Historically, the progress of Web-based applications and the
diverse nature of information from different Web applications ushered in the
need to unify content to a single point of access: the Web portals.

There are
several Web portal frameworks being developed in both the J2EE and .NET camp to
unify Web content and provide end users with a more efficient environment to
interact with the Web.

The portal technology is based on the notion of a portal
container that provides the basic infrastructure to host a load of disparate
applications wrapped up as portlets.

To facilitate cross-vendor Web application deployment as
portlets in portal containers, a number of specs were written with several
implementations in J2EE and .NET, but there still was no way to host content
from both J2EE- and .NET-based Web applications in the same portal container.

To fix this issue, WSRP (Web Service Remoting Protocol) came into being. But WSRP
is also pretty heavyweight and does not serve the needs of the enterprise to
provide an easy portal architecture.

In general, if we look at the portal implementations mostly
in the J2EE space, there are some major shortfalls:

The
idea of a portal-type solution started early with the classical page flip
kind of Web architecture and most of the portal specifications/implementations
are still abiding by that. With the Web 2.0 and the AJAX push portal,
solutions also need to move to an asynchronous way of request-response
handling, but the most popular Java portal specifications such as JSR
168/286 does not provide the same till date.

With
so many implementations of the portal container, it’s difficult to deploy
a portlet app. The deployment procedure varies from container to container
even after common standards like JSR 168/286.

There
is no way to deploy applications written in .NET and J2EE in the same
portal container.

This article looks at an easy portal infrastructure that’s built
on a Flex-based portal container and portlets (individual Web applications)
deployed as Flex modules. This portal framework provides full support for AJAX-type
message processing with a very efficient deployment of portlets and manages the
portlets so that they can logically connect to any Web application, freeing
developers from routing to J2EE/.NET portal frameworks. If you need a clean way
to integrate and reuse the same code for your Flex application based on either a
J2EE or .NET back end inside a portal container, read on.

This article is more about Java portal containers and the J2EE
back end, but the same principles may be applied to the .NET side as well.

CIO, CTO & Developer Resources

Basic Shortfalls in Today’s
Java Portal Solutions

To standardize the process of portal development and deployment,
there are standards such as JSR 168/286 and WSRP. These standards are driven by
a huge group of commercial portal vendors. First I’ll look at the underlying
architecture of the JSR168/286-based portal solution.

JSR 168/286 relies on the classical page-flip Web
architecture, where the full browser page is refreshed whenever an event
happens in the page. Figure 1 shows the architecture details of a JSR 168/286
portal solution.

This portal solution is based on the server-side aggregation
of content that is pushed to the browser upon request in the form of an HTML
document. The container that hosts the portlets resides on the server side
where the deployed portlets (individual applications) are logically managed. In
this architecture, the content from different portlets is aggregated in the
server and the net result is pushed back to the client browser as HTML. However,
to effectively make AJAX
(Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) type request/response handling work
for the portal, it’s required to manage portal/portlet interactions in the
client browser too. Without the notion of a client-side container present in
the user browser, it will be very difficult to have an AJAX-type
request/response work in the portals. With the architecture in place with JSR
168/286, we have the following shortfalls when it comes to AJAX-type
request/response handling:

Asynchronous
rendering of portlets is not currently mentioned in the Portlet Specification
JSR 286/168

With
non-standard work around too, it’s difficult to get AJAX working for more than one portlet on a
page. This also leads to intra-portlet communication using AJAX impossible even with JSR 286 support.

Whenever
a portlet state is updated without a server round-trip, the state that may be
encoded in other portlets may be stale, which is the most severe flaw when
working with AJAX.

Some
AJAX implementations
exist but are vendor-specific and non-standard. These solutions use JavaScript
to tie portlets in the browser and again tie portlets using a JSR 286 kind of
solution or session sharing in the server-side portal container.

How Can a Flex-Portal
Solution Come to the Rescue?

To fix the above issues and provide a rich portal framework,
Flex might be an ideal solution for Web applications written in Java or any
other technology. Flex applications are loosely coupled from the server-side
processes; they rely on the server just for data. Flex applications have self-contained
UI logic, which is ideal for portlets. Unlike JSP/ASP-type rendering where the
UI is closely attached to server-side processing, Flex UI logic does not depend
on the server side; it only needs the server-side data to bind Flex controls with
actual data. Hence, if the policy exists to fetch data from a server, Flex UI
can be connected to any server from any browser-based or stand-alone
application and render the same rich UI every time. This basic advantage of Flex
can be exploited to come up with a robust Web2.0-compliant portal architecture
as shown in Figure 2.

In the figure, the container runs in the client as a Flex
application with basic support for authentication/persistence, etc., being
provided by a server-side container process (may be implemented in J2EE /.NET/Web
services). Individual portlets are Flex modules deployed in the server, which
are instantiated in the portal container whenever needed. These individual
portlets can get their data using SOAP/HTTP from any Web server. Portlets are
managed by the portal container and can also be attached to an application
running in the same container server or any third-party/Web services server to
get the data. Portlets are designed as Flex modules to have minimum
downloadable size and to enable runtime hot deployment without any need to stop
or recompile the Flex portal container.

Now let’s see how this architecture scales with issues
discussed earlier and how does it tackle the same.

Indroniel Deb Roy works as an UI Architect for BlueCoat Systems.He has more than 10 years of development experience in the fields of J2EE and Web Application development. In his past he worked in developing web applications for Oracle, Novell, Packeteer, Knova etc. He has a passion for innovation and works with various Web2.0 & J2EE technologies and recently started on Smart Phone & IPhone Development.

Alex Nhu works as a manager, UI Development at Packeteer Inc. He has more than 11 years of work experience designing and architecting complex server-side J2EE and XML applications. He loves developing Web applications with Flex now after getting a taste of developing UI using other RIA platforms.

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Most Recent Comments

srinuguda08/21/09 12:46:00 AM EDT

Hi,

Kindly post the some sample on portlet implementation in flex.

Regards,

Lord198403/13/09 11:59:40 AM EDT

Hi,

very good article...

When you talk about portlet window you mean that portlet window is a mx panel and it contains a module, is it true?
how to achieve direct module to module communication?

I got a preliminary version of the Flex Container up and running with stuff discussed in the article with some sample portlets. I will post the URL soon, so that everyone can get a feel of it!

Andrea Bosio12/01/07 04:28:58 AM EST

Great article and excellent idea! Our company could be very interested and actively involved in this open source porject. At the moment we are setting up and deploing Liferay Portals as intranet system to our customers. Please contact me if you decide to start the project or if you are looking for partners.

Luke11/23/07 07:26:33 AM EST

Excellent overview article. We're looking at Flex as a portal/portlet technology for the next overhaul of our intranet system, I would be very keen to be involved in a dedicated container. Please let me know if you decide to post this as an open source project.

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